Second day of Internetdagarna ‘08

The second day of Internetdagarna (22/10-08) was spent in the Security track as well, except for the last seminar where I switched to the society track.

The first seminar was “Pålitlig e-post / Anti-spam” which translates to “Reliable e-mail / Anti-spam”. The moderator for this seminar was Jörgen Eriksson from .SE.

First speaker out was Amar Andersson from TeliaSonera and he spoke about “Spam-protection that undermine their own goals”. I can honestly say that I did not follow this good enough as I was very tired this first seminar and I kind of regret it now. However, the main problem presented by him was the lack of coordination and standards in anti-spam prevention methods. He mentioned blacklisting in general and the DUL-blacklist in particular, hostname “naming” (reverse lookups which results in a name conatining either “static” or “dynamic”) and how to make sure your e-mails got delivered in this day and age where the requirements for delivery can vary quite much from server to server (correct HELO/EHLO messages, correct reverse lookups, SPF and other DNS related issues).

Next speaker up was Bengt Carlsson from Blekinge Tekniska Högskola that just announced a new project between .SE and BTH. The project name was “säker e-post hantering bland illsinnad programvara” which translates to “Secure e-mail management amongst bad software”.

After this Rickard Bondesson from Linköpings Universitet took the stage to present his research on DKIM, DKIM-milter and DNSSEC implementations. This was a quite long and very informative presentation which stepped through his research in a comprehensive way under the following bullets; Forged e-mail, Prevention of forged e-mail, DKIM, Reliability within DNS, Implementation, Tests, Statistics, Experiences.

After this there was a small moderated panel debate on the topic of Reliable e-mail.

The next seminar was “Parasitekonomin på Internet” which (roughly) translates to “The parasitic economy on the internet”. Stefan Görling from KTH moderated and had one presentation, and the other speakers were two representatives from Lavasoft (you know, the guys behind Ad-Aware) and Martin Boldt (IT-security researcher from BTH).

Görling started out by picking at affiliate systems and the easy of exploiting these services for profit and he worked out from a site that supposedly uses this format in a legit way. He did not go into the malware point-of-view very much but he touched the subject when talking about “mis-spelled domain names default pages” which contain only affiliate links.

The guys (they were two) from Lavasoft then held their presentation which more or less detailed the different types of spyware they had included during the year, and also gave a strange remark saying the TeliaSonera was gaining money from the malware circulating on the internet (as they’re an ISP, they supposedly make profit when having their bandwidth used… hrrm…). This little remark came back to bite them in the ass when a (quite upset) TeliaSonera security employee demanded that they would take that statement back during the Q & A at the end of the session.

Following this Martin Boldt from BTH that discussed reputation systems and automatic EULA analysis. He had researched these areas and they were at this moment involved in creating web browser plugins and applications to enable users to share their thoughts and score on specific applications (binary files). See their project website at www.softwareputation.com for more information. He also noted that this project is still in Alpha stage. The ideas they’re having kind of looks like Panda Security’s Collective Intelligence, except it is user generated not automatic.

When it came to EULA analyzing they’ve taken a harder route than SpywareGuide’s EULA analyzer and they used many different bayesian and similar algorithms in order to define if an EULA is “good” or “bad” with a high level of success. Ideas for the future was to make this automatically integrated into system so that any EULA boxes could be automatically read and scored.

After this there was a Q&A session and Lavasoft’s statements was quite heavily scrutinized both by the TeliaSonera employee and Netnod‘s CEO Kurt-Erik Lindqvist (I think it was him but I only heard the voice, so don’t quote me on this). It seems like Lavasoft’s statement was just illustrating and that they based their assumptions on an US ISP that had misbehaved and in some ways had profited on bad software.

Here I switched room and joined the “Infrastructure and society”-line of seminars. The one I was interested in was “Integritet och övervakning” which translates to “Integrity and surveillance”.

This seminar was moderated by Johan Hallsenius (editor for Computer Sweden) and the debate panel was only populated by pro-Integrity people as none of the invited politicians and FRA-people had turned up even though they were invited. The panel members was Oscar Swartz (debater, writer and blogger), Patrik Fältström (Cisco), Fredrik von Essen (Swedish IT and Telecom Industries) and Daniel Westman (Juridicum, Stockholms University)

The focus of the debate was of course the FRA-law but also dangerous EU-directives and other laws that affect impede personal integrity. It was an interesting debate, but as “the other side” was missing no hard questions could be discussed. I talked briefly to Oscar Swartz before the seminar and he described it as a “non-debate”, as there was only one point of view from all participants (with small diversions). He wrote a post on “Internetdagarna” on his blog in which he breifly mentions this debate.

It was also to hear what Fredrik von Essen from the Swedish IT and Telecom Industries had to say on this issue.

Unfortunately I had to leave before the Q&A session that followed, so I’m looking forward to the sound recording that are to be released here.

Some pictures from this day:

Integrity debate:


Martin Boldt (from BTH):